


And Again

by Barkour



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Established Relationship, Future Fic, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-26
Updated: 2013-02-26
Packaged: 2017-12-03 16:09:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/700121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten years after the Reach failed on Earth, Jaime Reyes goes on with his life, day by day. So, too, does Bart Allen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Again

**Author's Note:**

> A day in the life story, written for a prompt of "future." Forgive my blatant ignorance on the subjects of medicine, medical residencies, etc.

The alarm went off at ungodly o’clock, and Jaime, too tired even to bury his head beneath a pillow, just groaned. The bed shifted. A hand slung over Jaime’s shoulder flopped then gripped his arm. Bart pushed up. In the dark of their bedroom, he was only a lean shadow, hot and near.

“What is it? What’s happening?”

Jaime turned his face down and groaned again. The alarm went on.

“Oh,” Bart said, “sorry, that’s mine. I’m going to—”

He peeled off Jaime—in the night they’d stuck together, Bart leaking out heat all over till he sweated—and went off into the darkness. Jaime rolled over to take advantage of the space left behind. He recoiled.

“Augh—Bart, why do you sweat so much?” Jaime picked at the sheet. It was damp between his fingers where Bart had slept.

The alarm quieted, and the overhead light flicked on. Jaime squinted and shielded his eyes. Bart had slapped the panel by the door. Bare but for his red boxers, he shrugged. Jaime might have appreciated the sight of Bart’s muscular thighs and narrow chest if it hadn’t been three in the morning.

“High metabolism,” Bart suggested. “You’re the doctor.”

He vanished into their shared closet.

“Your metabolic rate goes down when you sleep,” Jaime shouted at him. “You shouldn’t be burning that much energy when you’re snoozing.”

Bart emerged in Flash costume, the hood loose around his neck, face unmasked, and his boots pulled up. “I can also run three times the speed of sound,” he said. He smiled brightly. “It’s the miracle of the human body!”

Jaime reached for the pillow. He was going to bury his head after all.

“Your body’s not normal, mi guepardo.”

“Well, it’s the only one I’ve got,” said Bart, prosaic, “and I kind of like it. Can you run through walls, Mister Still Sleeping In Bed?”

“It’s three in the morning,” Jaime said loudly through the pillow. 

He pulled it down just to glare at Bart. Bart, pulling the hood down over his face, smiled back.

“Sorry,” said Bart. Then he popped his goggles in place and the smile dropped. “There’s a hostage situation in San Francisco. Some guy calling himself the Undertaker is trying to take over a highway. I’m on call, so—”

Jaime waved him off. “Yeah, yeah. Go save the world. Or San Francisco, whatever. I got a shift at five.” He turned back to the pillow.

Then Bart was there, kneeling beside the bed and reaching for Jaime. He kissed Jaime three times, once, softly, on the ear lobe, once on the cheek, and lastly on the mouth.

“I’m trying to sleep,” Jaime grumbled into Bart’s mouth. “Early shift, recuerdas?”

“All right, all right.” Bart kissed Jaime’s nose on the way up. “You go ahead and crash. I gotta run. But I’ll see you later for lunch, okay?”

Jaime flapped his hand. “If I get a break.”

“Well, I’ll swing by,” said Bart. The Justice League’s call device went off again at his hip. “Oops! Gotta go!” And off he went.

Jaime waited a moment in bed, wallowing in the misery of being awake so early in the morning, and then he got up to turn off the light Bart had forgotten.

 _It would be more efficient to stay awake,_ said Khaji Da. _Your shift begins at five, so you must leave at four-twenty. It is currently three-fourteen. Going back to sleep will take a minimum of fifteen minutes. Preparing for your shift takes—_

Jaime rubbed at his eyes, crusted with sleep.

“I got off shift at nine last night. I’m going back to bed.”

_You will only be able to sleep twenty minutes at most._

Jaime collapsed onto the bed, mindful of the lingering damp spot.

“Mijo,” he said, “right now, twenty minutes is all I want.”

The bed was cooler without Bart, cooler and so much larger. Alone, Jaime stretched out, luxuriating in the seeming hugeness of their bed, and thought sleepily of the day ahead. He was dreaming of eating paella with Bart on the Watchtower—Bart in the Impulse costume he’d long outgrown, Jaime in scrubs—when Khaji Da woke him at 3:50 to get ready for his shift.

*

*

*

“Today is going to be one of those days,” the charge nurse, Loretta, said to Jaime by way of greeting. She had three charts in hand and a phone in the other, and she’d a pen tucked behind each ear.

Her prediction came true twice over by seven. Between his second and third cups of coffee (and he didn’t even like coffee), and after an elderly man (with no record of dextrocardia) with complaints of chest pain accused Jaime of looking for his heart on the wrong side, Jaime wondered if a residency in emergency medicine might not have been the best choice.

He said as much to Loretta during a brief moment free of patients.

Loretta sighed and snapped her fingers at a passing nurse, beckoning her near. To Jaime she said, “Oh, honey. I wonder why I chose the E.R. every day.”

He tipped his coffee cup to her in acknowledgement and turned to lean back against the counter. The coffee was lukewarm, bitter and too thick, less liquid and more sludge. He slurped it down anyway. He’d drunk worse.

 _You have said this before,_ said Khaji Da.

Jaime flicked his eyes up, glancing down the hall. The corridor was busy, of course it was, but no one was heeding him. He brought the cup up again as if to drink and said,

“Said what?”

 _That you regret your decision to serve in the emergency medical department,_ Khaji Da said. _Yet you persist. Your actions contradict your statements._

Jaime sighed a little into his coffee and took another regrettably mushy sip. At least the caffeine was working.

“Sometimes you complain about things,” Jaime said. “That doesn’t always mean you don’t want to do them. It’s just, like—” He lowered the cup, thinking. His nail scraped idly at the rim. “Like a volcano, right? You gotta vent or else you’ll explode.”

Khaji Da was silent. It often was when it thought. Jaime wondered at that. In a way, this was like carrying around a child in his head. He finished the rest of his coffee and began looking for a recycling bin. For a hospital that advertised its facilities as green, he sure had a hell of a time finding anything green in it.

 _Is it a necessity of your biology?_ Khaji Da asked. _This expression of emotion._

Jaime dumped the cup in the bin he found at the end of the hall. “It’s a necessity for everyone.”

_I do not believe I require such ‘venting.’_

“Maybe not,” Jaime allowed. Who was he to tell an alien life form what was necessary for its emotional health? He sighed a little and stretched his arms out behind him, savoring the way the muscles pulled at his shoulders. “We still got to work on some of your parameters, though.”

 _Human conceptions of morality are counterproductive,_ said Khaji Da. _If an individual is weak then it is better to eliminate it for the betterment of the swarm._

Jaime scrubbed at his brow with the heel of his hand. The caffeine was finally kicking in; he felt the buzz in his chest.

“Humans don’t swarm, mijo.”

_Inaccurate._

Jaime was on the verge of getting into a philosophical debate about identity and society with what would look to the unknowing passerby to be a simple, unassuming recycling bin. Then his pager went off in his breast pocket and, as he felt for it, a nurse rounding the corner spotted him and shouted.

“Doctor Reyes! Room seventeen, stat.”

He palmed his pager and took off—shot off a hurried “thanks” to Carla as she pushed on to her charge.

Room seventeen was in the beginning throes of disaster. A small child had been laid out on the bed, and nurse—Jana, nurse Jana was drawing blood from the child’s arm. The child—the patient was unconscious.

A woman—the patient’s mother—hovered at the foot of the bed. Her eyes were dry but her hands twisted and twisted before her.

“He was sick earlier,” she was saying, her fingers unraveling knots then shaping them again, “he threw up breakfast and he didn’t want to eat lunch, and then he couldn’t walk, and—and when we were on the way over here, he just, he went to sleep and I couldn’t wake him up. I had to get someone to help me bring him in.”

Jaime guided her to the chair set up by the bed. Gently, he said, “We’re going to do everything we can to help him, ma’am.”

“I just, I don’t know what happened,” she said, and now her face began to crumple. “He was fine last night, but now…” Her breath shortened.

Jaime turned. “Jana—”

She capped the last of the vials and stuck it alongside the others in the case. 

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” she said, coming over with a smile to the woman. “Doctor Reyes is very good…”

The patient’s head had lolled to one side. Jaime carefully levered it up, face to the ceiling, and, fishing the little light from his pocket, he rolled first one eyelid up and then the other, checking each with the light. The pupils were unresponsive. His own face reflected out of them.

“Did he hurt his head recently?”

The woman looked up, her brow furrowing. “I’m not sure…” Then her face cleared. “Yes, a couple nights ago—he was staying at his father’s, and he fell out of a tree. But he was fine after that.”

Jaime began gently palpating the scalp, feeling for any bumps, any nodules, any abnormal swelling. As he did so, Khaji Da said, _Scanning._ Jaime sent out a private thank you.

“Did you notice any changes in his behavior?” 

He felt for the child’s pulse with his fingers at the throat. Steady, but slow. Breathing was the same. He glanced again at the monitor: the blood pressure was recorded as unusually high.

“Oh—he lost his temper yesterday,” said the mother. “But he doesn’t like helping with the dishes, so. And he said his head hurt last night, but—”

Jaime thought: stroke; and then he thought: please, no.

 _The human larva is hemorrhaging,_ said Khaji Da. _A blood vessel has ruptured in the brain._

Calmly, as calmly as he could—he didn’t want to upset the mother—Jaime stood and smoothed the hair back from the child’s brow. The child was so very small. Six according to his chart. Not old at all.

“I’m ordering a CT scan of the brain,” he said. “What I’m going to do is go call the radiology department and then we’re going to take your son right there.”

“Why?” The woman began to rise from her chair. “What’s wrong? Is he going to be all right?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Jaime. “But we need to rule out the possibility of a hemorrhagic stroke. That’s why we need to do it right away. Can you stay here with your son or would you like a nurse to come and stay with you?”

The woman looked to her son, alone in that thin bed, his wan and sleeping face turned to her.

“I’ll stay here,” she said quietly.

*

*

*

The surgeons took over. Another emergency called Jaime away. The woman—Kami Asp—caught his arm.

“You’re leaving?”

“I’m sorry,” Jaime said. He looked, with her, through the glass partition and into the operating room where her son, Jason, laid tiny on the steel table. “There’s nothing I can really do here. But I promise, when he’s out of surgery—”

Miss Asp took his hand. “Thank you,” she said.

Alone, in the elevator back down to the emergency department, Jaime leaned back against the glossy, faux-marble finishing and covered his face with his hands. It was nearly noon, and he had five hours left on his shift.

 _Jaime Reyes,_ said Khaji Da. _The human larva is not your responsibility._

“Every one of my patients is my responsibility,” said Jaime tiredly. “Even if I’m not the one doing the surgery, that kid’s still my responsibility.”

_Why does it matter to you that this human should live? Many specimens die daily. Biological beings are meant to die. It is inevitable. Your lives are intended for this._

Jaime watched the floors slip by in the electronic read out above the elevator doors. He gripped the steel banister behind him, felt it push into his back.

“Every life is important,” he said at last. “People die every day. But that doesn’t mean you don’t try to save them. I mean—that’s why I’m a doctor.”

 _It is easier to destroy than it is to create,_ guessed Khaji Da.

“Yeah,” said Jaime, remembering the first time he’d heard that—the first time either of them had heard it. “It is.”

25% of all children with hemorrhagic strokes died, either because of the stroke or surgical complications. The brain was notoriously difficult to operate on, and while a child’s brain, still growing and developing, was better able to forge new neurological connections and had a higher chance of recovering than that of an adult’s, that cold specter death lingered.

The elevator stopped at the third floor. A nurse pushing a cart stepped on, and they exchanged smiles and short nods.

Easier to destroy than to create.

He looked down to his feet. Closed-toe shoes as per hospital regulations. Jaime stuck to sleek, black shoes. A little class to add to his maroon scrubs and white coat—hospital regs again. Uniformity of appearance, so patients could more easily recognize the doctors and nurses. The shoes, though: Bart called them Fred Astaire shoes. 

“How do you know about Fred Astaire?” Jaime had demanded. “You guys had Turner Classic Movies in the future?”

“No way,” said Bart. “We didn’t even have television. You don’t know how easy you’re living. You guys have the internet.”

Jaime’s head came up from his biochem text. “Are you pirating old movies off my school wi-fi?”

Bart made a hook with his hand and said, “Arrrr, me mateys!” and then laughed when Jaime tried to wrestle the tablet from him.

Jaime was smiling at his feet when the elevator dinged. The doors rushed open. The nurse pushed her cart out onto the emergency department’s floor, and Jaime, straightening his scrub top, followed her out. There was work to do.

*

*

*

At a quarter to one, Jaime finished stitching up a gash in a young woman’s thigh. She’d stared at him in horror when he’d walked through the door, but when he offered to find a woman doctor, she’d stuck her chin out and told him to get it over with.

“If it helps,” he said as he made the first stitch, “I’m kind of gay.”

“Oh,” she said. She tucked several beaded braids back behind her ear and mustered a smile. “Um. Me, too.”

It only took ten stitches and then he was done. A referral to a primary care doctor to get the stitches out, an antibiotic prescription, and one awkward hey-I’m-gay-you’re-gay fistbump later, Jaime was out of the room.

He passed by the nurse’s station to return a pen and got a surprise in return: Bart, spinning in one of the swivel chairs. He came complete with an untied shoe, rumpled hair, and a fast food bag stained at the bottom with grease.

“What are you doing here?” 

Jaime tossed Loretta the pen. She saluted him with it and then, as she walked past by Bart, she waggled her eyebrows at Jaime and made a “you did good” face.

“Oh, nada,” said Bart, “just figured I’d drop by and make sure my marido takes out some time from his busy schedule to eat lunch, courtesy his totally crash and good-looking husband who ran all the way here from Toronto.”

The bag was still hot. “What is this?” asked Jaime, surprised.

Bart beamed. “Poutine. It’s like French fries, but taken to the most awesome imaginable extreme. I got you a burger, too.” He winced. “But I forgot to get you a soda…”

“Forget the soda,” said Jaime, with feeling. “This is perfect. You’re a lifesaver. I haven’t eaten since four. Unless you count the coffee here, and I don’t.”

“I’ll trust you on that one,” said Bart. 

He smiled up at Jaime, who really did not need the way Bart’s long legs just splayed out like that. When had Jaime drunk his last cup of coffee? He wanted, suddenly, just to droop down on top of Bart and stay there for the rest of the day.

Instead Jaime said, “Thanks for the food. I’m sorry—we’re really busy here right now, so—”

“No worries,” said Bart, standing. “I have to finish debugging that program for release this weekend anyway. Do you want me to pick you up after work?”

Jaime gave him a withering look, or as withering a look as a guy could give the guy who’d just brought him poutine from Toronto all the way to Houston. 

“Oh, right,” said Bart, “flying, I got it, don’t rub it in. Yeesh.”

Jaime caught him by the wrist and Bart, ever the actor, spun dramatically around and put his hand up at Jaime’s shoulder.

“I’ll see you later,” Jaime said.

Bart leaned up and smooched Jaime quickly, just a warm buss on the lips, Bart’s lips puckering so some little slickness clung to Jaime. The warmth of it pulled at Jaime. Then Bart stepped away.

“And I,” he said, “will see you in a flash.”

Jaime rolled his eyes skyward. “Ugh. Just go.”

Winking, Bart went.

*

*

*

Jaime got a call from the neurosurgery department at half past four.

“The kid made it,” said the surgeon. “It’s going to be touch and go for a while. He’ll probably have some brain damage, but he’ll live.”

Jaime sagged against the counter and pressed a hand to his eyes.

“Thanks,” he said. “How’s the mother?”

“She’ll live, too,” said the surgeon. “I have to go, but I said I’d let you know so there you go. He’s recovering in thirteen.”

“Thanks,” said Jaime again. That was all he could think to say. That was all there was to say, really.

In a little bit he’d go up to check on the kid—see how the mother was doing. Jason was his patient, after all; but it was more the thought of leaving a kid alone like that, that made Jaime finish typing in his report on the lady with the cut on her thigh and push back from the computer.

Passing through the lobby, he paused. The television hooked to the wall was turned to a local news station that was in process of recounting important events from around the country. The presidential candidates had both made stops in Metropolis, an actress had been seen leaving a restaurant with some indie musician, and the Flash was in Chicago. Kobra—the new Kobra—had brought his personal army in.

“I don’t know,” said one of the patients under the TV, “maybe if Superman was there…”

“The Flash’ll take care of it,” Jaime said. He was smiling up at the headshot the news station had used of Flash. “He’s a lot tougher than he looks. You know, he can run three times the speed of sound. That’s pretty crash.”

The nurse at the check-in desk laughed. To the patient, she said, “Doctor Reyes is the Flash’s biggest fan. He’s got a pin-up in his locker from Teen Super Dream.”

“It’s from the New York Times,” said Jaime mildly. “But don’t tell my husband about it, okay?”

The nurse mimed zipping her lips and then, laughing again, she turned back to her computer. Jaime made for the elevator. He was thinking of the kid upstairs, recovering from surgery, but he was thinking, too, of Bart, Bart alone in Chicago facing off against Kobra and all his reptiloid minions.

 _It is statistically unlikely that the Bart Allen will be exterminated,_ offered Khaji Da as the elevator rose.

“Oh, gracias,” said Jaime, “that helps a lot.”

Khaji Da said, _If you are concerned then it is possible to offer assistance._

“No,” said Jaime, waiting for his floor to come, “he can do this. He’s beat this guy down before.” Bart had survived so many things, things Jaime could never truly know. “And I can’t just run out on my shift. There’s people depending on me here.”

 _Like the larva,_ said Khaji Da.

“Yeah,” said Jaime. “Like Jason.”

*

*

*

The kid was still out when Jaime slipped into the room. Miss Asp had her hand on top of his, her fingers curled around his wrist. When Jaime opened the door, she lifted her head.

“Just checking to see how he’s doing,” he said quietly.

Miss Asp brushed at her eyes. “He’s doing—he’s doing good, the surgeon said. He thinks Jason’s going to—” Her voice cracked. She looked quickly away, back to her son. “He’ll live.”

Jaime crossed to the other side of the bed and beginning working with the monitor. “I’m going to get some vitals. And I wanted to let you know, I’ll be going off shift in an hour, but we’re going to get another doctor to look after Jason.”

“Thank you,” said Miss Asp again. She clutched her son’s hand. “Thank you—so much. Thank you. All of you. He loves all those superheroes so much but it’s not like—I couldn’t call Wonder Woman to save him.”

Jaime noted pulse, respiration. “Does he have a favorite hero?” he asked, copying blood pressure down, too.

“Mm,” said Miss Asp, nodding. She reached over to brush her son’s bandaged forehead with the back of her hand. “He just worships Blue Beetle.”

Jaime looked down at that boy.

“Blue Beetle,” he said. “Huh. Not a lot of people still trust him, after that thing with the, you know, the Reach.”

“That was so long ago,” she said, reproachful. “He’s done so much to help everyone. I think it’s all right to forgive him. And anyway,” she said, leaning forward to grasp her son’s hand again, “Blue Beetle’s not the one who saved him.” And she bent to kiss her son’s hand, very lightly.

*

*

*

It was too much to hope he’d get through a shift like that without having to worry about his other job calling him in. He was changing into jeans and a t-shirt in the locker room when Khaji Da patched Superman through.

Jaime knocked his head against his locker door. “Yeah? Let me guess—trouble in space?”

“The International Space Station is under attack by what looks to be some kind of deep space squid,” Superman reported. “Its orbit is taking it right over you—do you think you can make it?”

“Yeah,” Jaime said, trying to decide if it was worth it to grab another cup of that caffeinated slime on the way out or not. “Just give me a minute and I’ll be up there.”

“Great,” said Superman. “Martian Manhunter and one of the GLs will meet you there.”

Jaime pulled back from his locker. “Wait,” he said, “how big is this squid?”

“It’s large, I would say,” said Superman.

“Oh,” said Jaime. “Okay. Well. Just checking. Hey— do you know what happened in Chicago with Flash?” 

"Everything's under control," Superman said, kindly; superhero marriages tended to be common knowledge among their peers. "Flash secured the area and he has Kobra in custody. Very few damages, given Kobra's track record. He did good out there." 

Jaime breathed out and closed his eyes, only briefly. 

"All right," he said. "I'm on my way."

After he got out of the hospital, that was—maybe the back staircase. Of course the space squid couldn’t have waited until after he’d left work. And of course it wouldn’t be something he could hope to see Flash helping out with—well, that was life. Maybe they’d still be able to get dinner.

 _You have tomorrow ‘off,’_ Khaji Da reminded him.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Jaime. “That doesn’t help me now, though.”

 _I understand,_ said Khaji Da. _You are venting. It is inefficient._

“I didn’t ask you,” Jaime said, taking the stairs two at a time.

At the foot of the stairs, as Jaime pushed out of the hospital and made for the patch of trees that would best hide his transformation, Khaji Da spoke again: _You did well with the larva._

Jaime ducked beneath a low hanging branch. “I think you’re getting soft,” he said, smiling.

 _I am adjusting my parameters,_ said Khaji Da.

*

*

*

Jaime opened the door to the flat he shared with Bart, and he opened it to the smell of seasoned chicken frying in butter. For only the briefest of moments he lingered there in the entryway, resting against the door as he closed his eyes and just breathed in that warm smell. His muscles ached. Bones, too. He thought perhaps he could have stayed there for the rest of the night.

Then Bart shouted, “Welcome back!” from the little kitchen that sat off from the similarly small living room. A loud sizzling interrupted him. 

Cooking was something Bart had picked up a few years ago, because “Jay said it helps with focus,” Bart had said. “You can’t rush it or anything. You have to do everything at a certain time.” Then he’d sighed and said, “But I don’t get why you can’t just microwave everything. It takes forever.”

“Well, if you keep eating microwave pizzas, you’re gonna die,” Jaime had said. “Your heart will just explode. That’s my medical conclusion.”

“Well, my medical conclusion is pizza is radicular. And I’m gonna eat all the pizza I want,” Bart said; that lasted a week, and then Bart swore off pizza for the rest of his life (translation: a week).

Now, Jaime kicked off his shoes and set down his saddle bag and knocked the door shut. 

Jaime wandered back to the cramped kitchen, where Bart was in boxers and a Keystone College Mathletes t-shirt, flipping thin lengths of chicken breast in a butter-soaked frying pan. He was drumming his feet as he did it, fast but not so fast he wore through the floor.

“It’s going to be another ten minutes, probably,” said Bart, “but I just turned up the heat to the max so maybe it won’t take that long. I am hungry.”

Jaime collapsed at their little table. The chair, one of the pair they’d picked up at a garage sale for $5 together, creaked under his weight and rocked, made uneven by the shorter leg at the back right. As Khaji Da did every night, it warned that the chair was structurally unstable and required replacement. As Jaime did every night, he ignored Khaji Da. Until it broke under him, the chair wasn’t a problem.

“I kicked so much ass today,” Bart said. “Kobra’s kid—you know, that guy who tried to take over Keystone City last year—anyway, he tried to sync up the whole Chicago metro grid with him, but I took care of that. You’d think he’d learn, but I guess the baddies here aren’t really plugged in, if you know what I mean.” He shook oregano and chili powder into the pan in turn.

Watching Bart—Bart in his boxers and his t-shirt, his long, thick thighs bare and his lean arms flexing as he worked—watching Bart, Jaime thought of the long day gone, the time that had passed him by. It was nine-forty-two at night, and Bart was cooking pan-fried chicken for Jaime and for Bart to share.

“Do you ever regret anything?” Jaime asked. He was tired; that was why it came out.

“I regret not ordering food,” said Bart. His shoulders worked. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, and the musculature in his buttocks rolled with it. “I know it’s supposed to help me focus but it takes so-o-o-o-o lo-o-o-o-ong.”

Jaime should have let it be at that.

“Not that,” he said. He gestured vaguely. “Just—I don’t know. Being a computer programmer. Living—with me.”

He knew that sometimes at night, even when Bart clung to Jaime and sweated so they stuck together wherever their skin touched, Bart dreamt of death and ash and Blue Beetle bearing him down into the snow and calling him slave and not mi vida, mi guepardo, pegajoso (as he peeled Bart off in the hours of the morning, when Bart, dreaming, would cling till that sweat held them together, skin to skin).

Bart moved the pan from the burner to the stone countertop. He flipped the heat off and began lifting the fried chicken breasts out of the pan and onto a large plate set aside for that purpose.

“If you’re asking me if I regret coming back in time,” said Bart, “no. I don’t.” He guided the chicken with a fingertip, from the spatula to the plate. “And if you’re asking me if I regret coming back for you, I don’t regret that either.”

He brought the plate over to the table, setting it down before Jaime. Bart looked down at Jaime, and Jaime, his heart worn out, at last lifted his gaze. Bart’s eyes were lowered, his mouth a straight line that pinched just so at the center. Even now there was something of the child soldier in him. Perhaps there was something of the child soldier left in all of them. But Bart—there had been a time, another time, in which Jaime had been lost and Khaji Da lost, too, and the Reach had used them not to create, but to destroy. And Bart had been there.

“And,” said Bart, “if you’re asking me if I regret crashing your entire mind last night—”

“I’m being serious,” Jaime protested.

“I’m always serious,” said Bart, his green eyes dark, the corners of his mouth soft and sloping. Then, to prove his point, he stuck his tongue out at Jaime and crossed his eyes. “Do you want water?”

Jaime sank back in his chair. “I think I’d rather have a beer.”

“Rough day?”

“There was a kid,” Jaime said. He studied his fingertips on the table. His nails were short, cut like that to keep from snagging on gloves.

Bart paused at the fridge. His arm rested on top of the fridge door.

“There was a kid,” he echoed, “and—”

“And he lived,” said Jaime. “I caught it in time—we caught it in time. Hemorrhagic stroke. An artery burst in his brain. He could have died.”

“But he didn’t,” said Bart. He pulled two beers from the fridge and moved to gather plates and silverware.

Jaime curled his fingers in. “But I keep thinking, what if he did? What if I hadn’t caught it? What if the surgeons had messed it up? If I’d been Blue Beetle, maybe I could’ve—I don’t know.”

“But he did live,” Bart said. He set the beers down. Plates, silverware. Napkins, too. “Blue Beetle didn’t have to save him. Jaime Reyes did.”

Jaime took the beer can in hand and rolled it between his palms, feeling the cold condensation smearing against the aluminum. Bart sat down across from Jaime.

“Listen,” Bart said, “take it from me: if you spend your time thinking about everything you should have done, or everything that could have been different, you’re not going to stop thinking about it. Stop obsessing about the past. Change what you can. Live with the rest.”

“Man,” said Jaime, but the knot in his chest eased. “It messes me up when you get profound.” He managed a smile.

“Don’t worry,” Bart said, shrugging. “It’ll pass.”

Bart popped the tab on his beer can and Jaime, yawning, followed suit with his own can. The beer fizzed, spilling over, and Jaime bent to lick the froth from his fingers. 

“Aw, man,” said Bart, “you should’ve let me do that.”

“You’ll get another chance,” said Jaime. He took a long drag on the beer before he bothered to fish a length of chicken from the serving plate.

Bart ate as he did most things: quickly, without reflection; this, some remnant conditioning from another time, another place, when food was hard to come by. The beer, at least, he sipped at instead of downing, though Jaime knew it, like most drugs, would mean little to Bart’s accelerated metabolism.

The flat was quiet. The air conditioning hummed softly, and the wail of a siren outside was distant and then gone. It was night now, and Jaime was home.

Bart’s lips gleamed, slick with where he’d drunk from the can. The table was small; it barely fit the two of them. Jaime scooted his chair around—again, it creaked—and leaned forward to lick the beer from Bart’s mouth.

“Definitely the highlight of my day,” Bart sighed. He grabbed Jaime by the front of his shirt and dragged him near.

Between kisses, sloppy kisses with teeth, Jaime managed to say, “I’ve got tomorrow off.”

“Who cares about tomorrow?” said Bart impatiently. “What about right now?”

And maybe he was right about that, Jaime thought. Maybe it was the right then that mattered most of all. Then Bart pulled Jaime down with him, and Jaime decided that right here and right now, he could live with this. He could definitely live with it, just fine.


End file.
